Floods Exposed Weaknesses in California Prisons’ Emergency Plans. They Still Aren’t Ready

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In 2023, amid record-breaking rain and snow, two prisons in the southern San Joaquin Valley faced a serious risk of flooding. But neither prison, California State Prison, Corcoran or the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility, had a robust evacuation plan on hand and ready for the looming disaster.

Instead, the prisons developed a joint plan to transfer roughly 8,000 incarcerated people to other state prisons within 11 to 14 days — or longer. Wheelchair-bound individuals, the plan stated, would take six days to evacuate. And department buses intended to shuttle people to safety could take up to a day to arrive.

The floods that year ultimately did not reach the prisons, but the threat they posed illustrated how California’s 90,000-prisoner corrections system has failed to prepare for natural disasters. That’s according to a report issued last week by an independent agency that oversees the department’s disciplinary process and internal investigations.

“While California’s prisons are vulnerable to wildfires, floods, and earthquakes, we found they are not adequately prepared to respond to emergencies posed by natural disasters,” stated the report by the Office of Inspector General, which reviewed emergency plans for 30 state prisons after fielding concerns about the department’s disaster response.

The report detailed deep fractures in the department’s emergency preparedness, including issues of transportation, varied risk assessment methodologies, lacking mutual aid agreements, timely evacuations, and prison overcrowding. As of December, California’s prison system was operating at roughly 120% — or 16,000 people — over its designed capacity, according to the report.

“Not only are some prisons overcrowded, but the department is unable to evacuate the incarcerated population and staff at most prisons within the first critical 72 hours of an emergency,” the report noted. “Without the ability to quickly evacuate prisons, it is likely that wildfires, floods, and earthquakes will result in loss of life within the incarcerated population.”

Notably, the inspector general found that none of the prisons included a plan to evacuate incarcerated people outside their gates, but rather focused on moving “the incarcerated population to and from locations within the prison.”

The report concluded with a list of 18 recommendations, including ones that would bring the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation into compliance with California regulations around emergency planning.

Carlee Purdum, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Houston who researches how disasters impact incarcerated people, said the report is a “first step” in identifying more resources to support prisons and corrections agencies as they plan and prepare.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Purdum said. “Prisons and corrections agencies are very marginalized and isolated in the emergency and disaster planning space. The significant takeaway should be that we have not engaged in these kinds of discussions, and put forth the kind of state level resources and accountability into these institutions.”

Advocates for years have been sounding the alarm over the ways in which California prisons are ill-equipped to confront climate hazards due to issues such as overcrowding and aging infrastructure. A 2023 report (PDF) by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and the nonprofit organization Ella Baker Center for Human Rights chronicled those concerns and urged the state to implement safeguards.

“People inside have a fear that the actual plan is to abandon them in the case of an emergency. It is deeply troubling,” said James King, director of programs for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. “In these public health crises, it’s not just going to affect the people in the prisons, either incarcerated there or working there. It’s going to impact the entire county, the entire community.”

Those concerns were echoed by Dax Proctor, statewide coordinator for Californians United for a Responsible Budget, a statewide coalition of organizations that view climate hazards as a key reason to close prisons.

“The number one solution to address these issues at hand is to reduce the number of people locked up in California prisons as rapidly as possible,” Proctor said. “A good starting place would be those most vulnerable to climate hazards.”

Officials from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services answered questions about the report before lawmakers at a hearing Thursday. They assured lawmakers that the department would not work alone in a large-scale emergency.

“California has a vast amount of resources and we would rely heavily on our federal, state and local partners to assist us with the evacuation of an entire prison,” said Melissa Prill, special agent-in-charge at the corrections department’s Office of Correctional Safety.

But Sen. Laura Richardson, a Democrat from Inglewood, said that in an unpredictable situation, those partners “may be busy assisting other people.”

“To assume that these other agencies are going to be available to help you, or to help us in a prison environment is not something, going forward, we have the freedom to assume,” Richardson said. “I would give this (office of inspector general)’s report of your organization — I would consider it an ‘F’ — frankly.”

Sen. Kelly Seyarto, a Republican from Murrieta, said he wasn’t “extremely critically concerned.”

“I think we’re getting a little overboard in terms of thinking that we are going to have to evacuate entire prisons,” Seyarto said. “It’s just not a practical thing to think that somehow the whole prison is going to catch on fire.”

In a statement to CalMatters, department spokesperson Mary Xjimenez said prisons take an “all-hazards” approach to emergency planning and that it coordinates its plans with the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. The department “follows the FEMA National Incident Management System, which is the national doctrine that provides all federal, state, and local response agencies with a consistent set of principles, management structures, and a systematic approach to emergency response.”

King said the department has a history of being unprepared for climate hazards and instead reacts to them once they inevitably occur.

“These are simply facts,” King said. The department “could accept these facts and do something about them — or they could try to manage their response to the report. Disappointedly, it seems like they’ve chosen the latter. This is an opportunity to improve their response, to see the gaps and to create plans that address the gaps. ”

Cayla Mihalovich is a California Local News fellow.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.